APRIL 22 • 2021 | 41
T
wo longtime artists and one emerg-
ing artist are among those juried
into this year’s digital “Our Town
Art Show and Sale,
” the 36th, sponsored
April 22-May 6 by the Community House
of Birmingham.
Their entries, introducing new individual
directions, will be among 200 chosen with a
goal of having a mixture of art forms.
Steffanie Samuels, a nationally recognized
ceramist for 20 years, has turned to oil pastels
over manipulated photography to explore a
different dimension in her creativity.
Paula Zaks, who taught various art
forms at Akiva Hebrew Day School and
was an arts and crafts supervisor at Camp
Tamarack, has zeroed in on encaustic (uti-
lizing heated wax) prints.
David Bloom, whose career has been
based in purchasing for an automaker,
hadn’t thought about art since junior high
school but recently felt inspired when con-
templating additional pursuits. He turned to
multi-media for an enhancement to paint-
ing and came up with abstracted work.
For Samuels, the “Our Town” exhibit
offers a popular platform to spotlight her
evolution.
“I’ve moved from three-dimensional
to two-dimensional,
” said Samuels, a
resident of Royal Oak and member of
the National Council of Jewish Women.
“I’m showing two pastel paintings
enhanced by other media — Taking
Shelter After the Rains and Shrouded
Trees.
“I said what I had to say with clay and
took a break from art by working for
the University of Michigan as director
of development for specific medical ser-
vices. As time went on, I missed the cre-
ativity of the art world and discovered
the joys of oil pastels and photography.
”
Samuels, whose sculptural work has
been featured in exhibitions at the White
House and Smithsonian Institution,
starts her newer projects with photographs
taken in rapid succession, digitally manip-
ulates the images, prints them on archival
cotton rag paper and uses colored inks as
base tones before layering oil pastels in a
variety of methods.
While Samuels gives her personal touch
to the two-dimensional techniques, her
sculptural projects still can be seen in the
permanent collections of the Blue Cross/
Blue Shield Corporation of Michigan and
Archie Bray Foundation in Montana among
other buildings, as well as in art books and
magazines.
ABSTRACTED IMAGES
Zaks is showing two very different works.
Birmingham
Community House
online art show
features 200 works.
Our
Arty
Town
SUZANNE CHESSLER
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Details
“Our Town Art Show and Sale” can be
viewed online April 22-May 6 at
communityhouse.com/event/our-town-
art-show-sale.
David Bloom
works in
mixed media.
European Graffiti by Paula Zaks
continued on page 42
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